Online Entanglement Routing in Quantum Networks: A Game-Theoretic Approach

Quantum nodes exchange qubits to achieve largescale quantum computing applications in a quantum network (QN). However, due to environmental influences, entangled links used for data transmission would decohere over time. Besides, the scarcity of quantum memory in each quantum node necessitates frequent communication between nodes, leading to significant variations in the traffic matrix. Thus, providing real-time services in QNs becomes particularly important. To this end, this paper presents a new optimization problem and proposes a novel online algorithm, which combines the game-theoretic analysis results with the linear programming (LP) by the primal-dual technique. Finally, the simulation results demonstrate that the proposed algorithm outperforms the other baselines by up to 90 %.